Michael Schwab

Michael Schwab, da ta catalogue, 2017

Dr. Michael Schwab is a London-based artist and artistic researcher who investigates postconceptual uses of technology in photography, drawing, printmaking, and installation art. He holds an M.A. in philosophy (Hamburg University) and a PhD in photography (Royal College of Art, London) that focuses on post-conceptual post-photography and artistic research methodology. As founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) and through his work on the Research Catalogue, he has shaped the exposition of artistic research as a practice in its own right, a concern that runs through his edited book The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia (2013), Experimental Systems. Future Knowledge in Artistic Research (2015), and Transpositions. Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research (2018). His current work develops a polylocal theory of artistic research, in which research takes place across many sites that remain in consultation with one another. He convenes the Transart Articulation Studio (TAS), where practice-led doctoral researchers work on how their practices come to articulation. Through this focus on exposition, articulation, and polylocality, Schwab links artistic freedom with academic criticality.

Current research

Schwab’s research interests lie in artistic epistemologies and in the question of how artistic practices come to articulation as research. He is concerned with art publishing and the exposition of practice, particularly in digital environments such as the Research Catalogue, where text, image, sound, and data can sit alongside one another without being ranked. A second strand follows art-science collaborations, in which different ways of knowing consult one another without one serving as the measure of the other, and a third addresses documentary practices and the status of the photographic trace, including how photography and its traditions of evidence bear on contemporary research. Running through these areas is polylocal theory, which he is developing as a way of describing knowledge as articulated across many sites and scales at once. He also works on the infrastructures and pedagogies that support this kind of research, from research graphs to the artistic uses of vector media and AI technologies.

Website: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/researchers/10953